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So I had nothing to do for the weekend and thought I would give Vanguard a try again. I have played the game once before on trial but didn't get very far because no one wanted to play back then.

This time around the first thing I noticed when I logged back in was a lot of the crashing/random bugs were fixed.

As for character creation, class/race restriction means nothing to me becasue I played DDO and LOTR and I understand company wants to make money so by all means go for it. I was actually quite relieved that they let us try the class/race until 20 to see if we are willing to buy it or subscribe for the game. (never happened in DDO or LOTR.)

This allowed my friends and I to make a ton of characters to see which one we like more and what we are going to stick with regardless if we are going to have to pay 15$ after 20. (My personal philosophy is if I have spent more than 4-6 hours on a game in a 2 week period I won't mind shelling out some money. Because a movie these days are around 12$ where I live and that is entertainment as well.)

Because we haven't "paid" yet, I was asked on my stream that how I felt about equipment/bag/money restrictions.

Equipment Restriction - To be honest, as of right now I don't feel it but, I know for a fact the people that are willing to spend 10$ for "VIP gear every 10 level" has a huge bonus. My buddies and I level just fine and just as fast as most people with the normal gears. I understand from some of the veteran players that I talked to that after level 50, it will be progressively harder for us to clear dungeon without legendary or unique gears. But, according to them it will take me about a month for a new player to get to cap and that is playing A LOT. (Will probably be paying by the time we get to 20 so not much of a problem for us.)

Bag space - This to me is a little bit annoying but not enough for me to start a thread to bash on it. I honestly found DDO bag space to be a lot more restrictive because a GOOD ddo player is usually carrying extra sets of weapon/clickables equipments/accessories/etc. Those type of items along take up 2/4 or 3/4 inventory space. In Vanguard, most of the items you are picking up are NPC trash. We were averaging about 1 town trip evrey 45 minute to 1 hour before our inventory was full. (Not too bad, could be better if we got 6 or 10 more slots.)

Money Restriction - This part cracks me up when people raged about this. I level 7 toons from 1-20 and finally have liek 2 or 3 gold... The cap is at 3 Plat free players which is not obtainable according to some veterans at around 40-45. I have played EQ1 old school and I remember how I was dead poor until cap.

Caravan - I will pay money for this because I personally hate walking through a dungeon "bad experience in EQ1 where I would die trying to run through a dungeon to get caught up to my group." This is restricted to F2P players.

To explain what Carvan is I am just going to quote Gidion because I have never used it - "Its been a while since i used it and i can't even say that its still in game (Cause i just don't know). The way it worked when i used it was, if you have a grp of friends you have one invite them all to a caravan (6ppl limit, same as grp and fellowship) The one who is now leader can head of and travel to anyplace in the world and bind at a bind stone while the rest can be afk. When the other members of the caravan logs in again they will get a choice of spawning at their last location or at the caravan bindstone. I think they put a time limit on how long before you can make that choice 40min i think either logged out or in game im not sure..."

Brotherhood - My personal favor. This system that is not available to F2P players is a system that allows people that have friends/buddies that are a lot more busy than themselves and cannot be on all the time. With a limit of 6 people(group size) If for some reason you cannot play today and your friends had schedule to go grind mobs and level you don't have to worry about falling behind. If you are in a Brotherhood with them it means that you will be able to get the exp that they had gain even if you were not on.

As for building ships/housing restriction - I am on the fence about this because from what most veterans have told me to own one of those things it will cost a lot of $$$ and time and if I am going to be spending that much time and keeping up with the upkeep of a house or a ship I am more than willing to pay a measely 15$ a month or 10$ a month for 3 months.

If I were to rate this game on solo gameplay I would rate it 5/10.

But, if you have friends that you enjoy playing co-op or dungoen crawlers with this game will be close to 9/10.

In most co-op game and dungeon crawlers, the gameplay and "clunkyness" of a character is irrelevant. It is all about downing the boss or name mob or dungeon with your buddies which Vanguard provides in a LARGE world. It took me almost 1-2 hours to just fly around one of the first starting maps on stream to show my viewers.

This game is not meant for people that loves PvP or need consistent updates to the game. It is a game to sit back relax with your friends in.

Also some minor tips -

For people that do not know how to trouble shoot graphics cards or driver issues and are experiencing tons of crash problems please turn down settings to balance or lower. This solves the problems and it will allow you to run the game a lot more smoothly.

Quest Tracker and the Compass on the top center of your map is there for you to navigate to npcs that are not marked.

Drox UI even though it seems to have been out of date it is still functional. (Changes the text so that it is not as ugly or so that people have complained about.) MUCH MORE CUSTOMIZABLE

Google Vanguard Wiki, and look up guides/class/combat to learn about the Finish/Rescue/Counter system. It takes a little bit of getting used to but after you get it, it will enhance your dps quite a bit.

Updated - 8-14

For anyone interested I am currently playing on Telon, ign: Hisoka -lvl 11 psion (main) rest of the characters have been deleted :D

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I've used the caravan a few times. Most people don't really use it for dungeon crawls though. And if you don't have rl friends playing the game, chances are you won't use it. Most players don't want to give someone else permission to move them across the world. It's main use in game is, if your group plans to travel to a new continent or questing area together. That way someone can stay at the keyboard and run there, while everyone else gets some time to afk and do things at home before coming back to play together.

The brotherhood system is a really nice part of the game for good friends that play together. I noticed you didn't mention mentoring, which i think fits in the same category as those other features. In mentoring a higher level player 5+ levels over you can mentor down to your level so you can adventure together. A lower level player could have 5 others mentoring down to him at one time in group.

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Originally posted by ozerinxI actually didn't know they had the same system as EQ2. Does the person getting mentored get xp bonus as well? 5% or was it 10%?

Unless it changed brotherhoods are nothing like eq2. They don't affect you level at all.

What a brotherhood is is something that lets you create a brotherhood with upto 6 players. Brotherhood might be throught of like a small guild. Ideally everyone is the same level when they form the brotherhood.

Once the brotherhood is formed all the members share all the experience. So for example if your brotherhood plays tonight and you can't play when you log back in you will get a bunch of free xp basically your cut of all the brotherhood. So in a brotherhood you can't fall behind and xp is split between all players no matter what each member is doing.

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No I don't believe there is any bonus to the experience granted. But the person doing the mentoring still has better gear most likely and is stronger than the average player that level, so mobs do die a little bit faster usually. I don't recall there being any bonus to mentoring someone, besides the fun of playing together and the content still being challenging.